“Fairly slow paced ”

Current Employee - Assistant Mechanical Engineer in Swindon, Wiltshire, South West England, England

Current Employee - Assistant Mechanical Engineer in Swindon, Wiltshire, South West England, England

I have been working at RWE npower full-time (more than 3 years)

Pros

Not stressful, good worklife balance.Generally willing to invest resources in training.Nice office with good restaurant .Gym (apparently).

Cons

Slow progression, benefits and flexibility could be better.Recent reduction in staff has resulted in lower levels of expertise.Achievement and exceptional results not rewarded / distinguished.Uninspiring location.

Good colleagues to work with at ground level, some of which are highly talented and underrated.

Some improvements to delivery areas in recent times.

Cons

Senior Management not understanding their sub-teams treating them in a broad brush manner with edicts, showing inflexibility and lack of understanding especially of how technical teams work.

Highly politicised, focusing on what the perception of the team is to other departments.

Feels like a lack of trust in their staff to do the job.

Poor planning, with unreasonable expectations of delivery in some areas.

Constant Reshuffles / restructuring make the working environment feel uneasy and people demoralised.

Management and teams not communicating vertically or horizontally, with a lack of understanding or overview of what each team does.

there's a high turnover of permanent technical staff. Most seem to leave within a 12-18 month window, leaving one or two teams under-resourced and difficult to hire for. Contractors seem to wield more power and are treated better than permanent staff in some areas.

Advice to ManagementAdvice

Please start treating people as humans, not as just a place in an org chart.

Understand more about how a delivery can happen within a team if you treat them as adults not children. Place your trust in your staff more to deliver and support them positively.

So long as the team delivers, it's all that matters. It should not be about how the outside view to other departments is. Good results will speak for themselves, so communicate genuine success.

Admit when things aren't going as well as you'd like, and communicate in an open and honest fashion if this is the case, not sweeping it under the carpet.

Make concerted effort to positively retain your staff by engaging with them in a sincere fashion. We're all trying to achieve the same thing for the greater good of the company and customer.